My personal opinion is that for Microsoft this is a much better solution than to hire an external CEO with an MBA and no background in software/technology. If the news are true then I wish all the luck to Mr. Nadella.
Just trying to see if you (parent and g-parent) consider an MBA an overall negative signal, regardless of someone's background.
Steve Jobs and CEOs in-between kind of make a counter-example.
They have to make capital allocation decisions, based on the direction the market is taking. An MBA might be able to tell whether China or India needs more marketing dollars, but they won't know whether it's better to invest billions into different R&D efforts.
The executive in charge of mobile isn't going to tell the CEO "look, Windows phone is busted, just fire us and put everything behind a major effort to sell small-medium businesses turnkey enterprise systems."
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-30/microsoft-said-to-b...
After ten years of Ballmer, what Microsoft needs now is a professional manager to sort out the mess he left. They have no shortage of great technology people; what they need is someone to bring the organization to heel behind a universal vision.
Microsoft is not on the verge of great growth or in the position anymore to build "the next big thing." That ship has sailed for them, as all the people capable of building the next big thing have been run off by the ineffective management (or never hired in the first place) and work at Google or Facebook now. Microsoft is, however, at risk of losing a significant portion of their revenue should the PC industry continue its slide and start being displaced in the enterprise.
Nadella is the best choice that is available. I still hold that the best candidate out there for the job is Mark Hurd, but he apparently wasn't interested for the same reason a lot of other outside candidates weren't interested: Microsoft has an infamously poisonous corporate culture, and everyone who worked for an outside CEO would be trying to undermine him and take his job.
Unless that vision is just next quarter's earnings, they can't afford a MBA type who doesn't have a deep understanding of technology.
(eg - what google and apple unleashed on the world in the past 10 years was a major historical shift - coming from product/technical people at their core. arguably, this shift was one that only a newbie or outsider could pull off. 20/20 hindsight to say "microsoft could have dominated those arenas" when they had so many other verticals of strength to tend to. (and 20/20 hindsight for me to say this as well...))
IMHO microsoft needs to keep focusing on hacker-friendliness - they have a great lock on the corporate world, but the corporate world is starting to look to the hacker community for direction.
what do i mean by this?
big companies can't be trusted to just get brand loyalty and keep buying your stuff until they go out of business. look at RIM - Blackberries were mandatory company accessories, now it is BYOD. Look at the server market - the biggest consumers of servers (FB, GOOG) are using designs they made themselves. Tougher for Dell and HP to keep selling ready-made servers. How long before other major corporations are doing the same?
the enterprise market is more tech savvy than times past, and only getting more so. high-level technical creativity and intuitive understanding of product potential is vital.
This is a honest question as I often am not aware of the whole picture (and have a hard time picking the right sources for that kind of information -- not sure who to trust in a marketing war).
Even for big corporation, what would be a good number of servers for them to reach a critical mass where it is worth keeping all those HW engineers and increased support staff? They want to sign a contract, get regular supported servers, with warranty, etc, and focus on their core business. They get it from the regular folks of HP, Dell, IBM, etc.
Of course there are exceptions but are they numerous enough to say Dell and HP are doomed? I hardly think so. Corporations in HPC market might take a stab at creating something like this. The folks running app/DB/web/whatnot servers for ERP, financial, etc applications?
Anyway, I feel like the OP is exaggerating a bit.
They also need credibility with consumers and techies on their R&D and hardware/platforms side. Not that they don't have decent stuff now, but they have approached it like a large enterprise rather than as a hip tech company and it's really unsexy for people to proclaim their love of Azure vs [insert ANY other PAAS/IAAS here]. Just as an example.... Windows Phone and the whole Windows OS strategy is something else they should publicize better. At this point, hardly anyone is building Metro mobile apps because it's really unclear WTF Microsoft is doing beyond Windows 8.1, and what will happen to Nokia or their very few other hardware partners if sales don't take off. The Surface Pro is a really nice tab and fits well into a lot of IT strategies, given it hits both the "I want a sexy tablet!" and the "I need my freaking Excel and my goddamn PowerPoint animations!" sweet spots. MS has a ton of potential and loads of talent. They just need to motivate it toward the right objectives, and I think choosing a new CEO from within will help them get there way faster than hiring an outsider, especially one from a non-tech company.